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Astronomers Discovers the Youngest Pair of Asteroids

There are many Asteroids in our Solar System but in pairs they are rarely found . In a recent study, a pair of asteroids circling the Sun has been discovered which is only 300 years old. It is the youngest asteroid pair ever discovered. Asteroids are generally believed to have formed during the formation of planets in the Solar System, but this discovery may provide answers to many questions about asteroids. On the other hand, some questions are also arising.

 

Astronomer Petra Fatka, working at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Czechia, said that it is very interesting to find such a pair of young asteroids that formed only three hundred years ago. This is not an incident of yesterday but of this morning in astronomical time periods.

 

How are Asteroids formed?

When our Solar System was being formed from a huge and dense cloud of gas and dust, whatever was not associated with the planets or the Sun, floated as a remnant, eventually turning into things like comets, asteroids. It is believed that these bodies have been in the solar system since the time the Earth was formed. In fact, these substances were deposited only in rocky planets like Mars, Venus and Mercury, including Earth.

 

Why So Much Interest In Asteroids

For this reason, our scientists are very much interested in asteroids, due to which they study them to know the history of the solar system. But scientists also want to know how these bodies changed over time. This will also help in predicting the future behaviour of asteroids. Which are capable of changing its entire ecosystem by colliding with a sensitive planet like Earth.

 

The two newly discovered asteroids are named 2019PR2 and 2019 QR6 which were discovered separately in the year 2019 by the Pan STARRS1 Survey Telescope in Hawaii and the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. Their orbit around the Sun is elliptical, which is unusual compared to the orbits of asteroids that orbit the Sun by staying close to Earth.

A whole team to study

Actually, double asteroids are not a new thing. But the mechanism of their creation is not properly understood. That is why scientists have formed an observation team for this, so that more information can be obtained about this pair. For this, he took a picture of the couple with different telescopes.

How are Both Asteroids
These observations showed that the larger of the two bodies is one kilometer bigger and the other is half its size. The researchers also found that both have similar surfaces, which shows that they are derived from the same body. Combining the results with modeling, they found that this asteroid separated from its parent body only 270 years ago. .

Most asteroids probably arise from rotational fission. And from the residue coming out of it, small bodies are formed. But if there had been no disruption, it should have taken more than 270 years to build these bodies. But it is still a mystery how these bodies changed from one original active body to different inactive bodies in just 300 years. Now they will pass near the Earth in the year 2033.

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